let me observe your travels from family to the cafes of the
Marais and

Union Square and Whitechapel and then back to the front
porch,

only now, your aunt and uncles (if not your parents) are
beaming with pride,

let me heed your declamations of fire,

let me weave these wild flowers through your summer morning
curls.

Love
in the Reign of Raining Rockets

As the rockets rained down over the
land,

as the bombs crashed into
buildings, kiosks, roads,

onto all that was animate and
equally onto all that was not,

as the sirens commenced their song
of terror,

as the world largely sided with the
other side,

as the neighbors scurried like
cockroaches into darkness,

(but never like sheep to the
slaughter,

as someone observed in the
descent),

as the population shifted into
horizontality when possible,

or hovered when not, as the parents
considered the care

of their children when they
themselves were underground or stranded,

someone suddenly suggested Madame
Shoshanah.

True, no one really knew from
whence she came or from what she had fled

or how she had become someone who
whispered to souls invisible to others.

And she was getting on in
years. But her person was still presentable,

with traces of refinement evident
in her dress and chignon.

As was her apartment, with quick
access to the ground below.

And when she was asked, she clapped
her hands in delight.

She was surprised to be remembered,
to be invited to contribute,

in however small a way, towards
mitigating the national crisis.

And so she became giddy in
response, to the consternation of the delegate

who was extending this offer
(request) with some reluctance.

And so the parents brought their
children to Madame, if not with ease of

mind, then at least with a
sense of having done the best that was possible.

But it turns out that she was outstanding
with children, especially the

younger ones who still knew not to
look askance upon her ways. She sang

to them songs from long ago, when
there was a unity of purpose in the

country, and also songs in
another language from a country far away,

passed on by her mother who
eluded somehow the rockets of her day and

was herself in conversations
with partners not visible to young Madame.

She played games with the children
from a time before toys were automated

and danced with them in circle
formations at once attainable and intricate.

Passersby marveled at the figure of
Madame sheperding her flock through

detritus and din
and dust to and fro shelter.

And Madame seemed to have found a
new calling.

In the deluge of rockets, in the
company of children of today,

with their urgency—Sarah needs
pee-pee, Uri lost his teddy bear—

Dafnah can’t eat nuts—she was able
to initiate new conversations.

No longer was she speaking
unrecognized to her mother in her final days,

no longer was she speaking to a
husband

who abandoned her before her son
was born,

trying to imagine reasons for that
abandonment,

trying to make herself more comely,
more appealing,

more adaptable to his ever-growing
list of demands.

Trying, trying, oh how Madame did
try.

But with her son himself, killed in
a raid of some sort—

she couldn’t take in the
details—she found she could suddenly converse.

After years of silence, she heard
the sound of his voice

as they sang together the songs of
her mother.

She remembered his touch, the
weight of him in her arms,

fatigued from a day of sand and sun
and sea. Madame Shoshanah

remembered how handsome, how sleepy
he was on the morning he left

for what was supposed to be a
routine mission. The invisible friends, to

whom she had of necessity turned,
who never condemned the longevity

of her grief, who never told her
the period of mourning was over,

smiled, waiting in the shadows of her apartment and her mind.

Biographical Statement

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of four books of poetry,
Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres (2013), Uncle Feygele
(2011), What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008),
and The Insatiable Psalm (2005).His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Eclectica
Magazine, Forverts, The Lake, Prairie Schooner,
Pyrokinection, and The South Carolina Review.Tsugreytndik
zikh tsu tantsn: naye Yidishe lider/Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish songs,
a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music by Michał Górczyński was
released on the Multikulti Project label (www.multikulti.com).Taub was honored by the Museum of Jewish
Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been
nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net
award.With his colleague, Ellen
Cassedy, he is the recipient of the 2012 National Yiddish Book Center
Translation Prize for translation of fiction by Blume Lempel.Taub recently completed an artist’s residency
at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA).Please visit his web site at www.yataub.net.